Book review

Convenience Store Woman I stumbled upon “Convenience Store Woman” while perusing audiobook deals. Since I’m always interested in finding new Asian authors to read/listen to, I snapped it up. And boy, am I glad I did so. “Convenience Store Woman” tells the story of Keiko Furukura, a woman who’s never managed to fit into society. […]

The Budapest Artists’ Club “The Budapest Artists’ Club” takes place over two separate trips to Budapest, one on the brink of the new millennium, one almost twenty years later. In her first trip to Budapest, Laura loses her boyfriend but gains musical skills, and is caught up in a plot to switch out a viola […]

The Night Circus I’d heard about “The Night Circus” for a while before I finally got around to reading it. And when I first started it, I wasn’t sure if I actually liked it or not. But by the end, not only had I warmed to it, I was enthralled by it. It’s a strange, […]

The Monastery Zakhar Prilepin “Humanity is dark and terrifying, but the world is human and warm.” So ends Zakhar Prilepin’s massive historical novel “The Monastery” (Обитель), about the Solovki monastery-turned-prison-camp, the seed of the GULAG system. Following the fortunes of Artyom Goryainov, a prisoner in the camp, the novel charts all the aspects of prison […]

The Ashes of Aubrey Milner: The Chicago St. Clairs Ellison Blackburn “The Ashes of Aubrey Milner” is a detective story with a difference: the detective in question is a woman who has been brought from the future back into Victorian-era Chicago, and is now working as a police medical examiner, disguised as a man. When […]

Forfeit Dick Francis I hadn’t read “Forfeit” in, oh, twenty years or something, until I recently picked it up and reread it. As always, rereading is as enlightening as reading. “Forfeit” is one of Francis’s slighter works in many ways, but it gets added depth by the interactions between Ty (the hero) and his wife […]

Nocturne (The Fourth Talisman #1) Kat Ross A few months ago I got “The Midnight Sea,” the first book in this omni-series or mega-series or uber-series or whatever you want to call it, through a giveaway. It was definitely the stand-out of all the books I got through that particularly giveaway, and so I’ve been […]